So many lives, so little time

The Journals of Sylvia PlathEdited by Karen V KulkilFaber £30, pp1008Buy it at BOL

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, never published in England before, released in a heavily censored version in 1982 in the States, with, as the editor then put it, their 'intimacies' and 'nasty bits' removed, appear here more or less complete for the first time. We still don't have the journals of her last two years, one of which disappeared and one of which Ted Hughes, by his own account, destroyed shortly after her death: 'I did not want her children to have to read it [in those days I regarded forgetfulness as essential to survival].'

Not surprisingly, given this history, the publication of the surviving journals is being heralded as an event of some literary significance, Plath speaking without interference in her own voice. But although Plath was desperate to be published (that despair is a constant refrain in these pages), and no diarist writes without an invisible audience, of all Plath's writing, these are the ones which were never intended for publication.

When she was not winding her life into these diaries, Plath spent most of her time busily and determinedly transmuting their contents back out the other way into her art. Reading them, we become eavesdroppers. Given the intensity and rawness of the writing, at moments it feels like walking straight into someone else's dream.

It is however, I think, a mistake to see these journals as giving us access to some new or previously hidden 'truth' about Plath. One way of rendering herself in writing, they offer, in fact, no solutions to previous mysteries, no definitive answers to the questions which, with an interest bordering on, indeed, crossing over into, the obsessive her life has so often provoked.

Plath appears here as someone with, in her own early phrase, 'so many little lives': 'My writing, my desire to be many lives.' Many little lives, not like the proverbial nine lives of the cat, although her first failed suicide and eventual death too obviously invite that comparison, but as something she could use her writing to be, a way of ceaselessly shifting herself across different psychic territories, across different and often contradictory ways of experiencing herself.

If the journals are cause for celebration, it might be, bizarrely, because evidence can be found within them to support every single theory that has ever been produced about Sylvia Plath - the never recovered child of the dead father, the woman oppressed by the small, suffering psychic landscape of her mother, the woman trapped in a domestic life unredeemed by a feminism which arrived too late on the scene, the woman nursed by her husband out of pain into burgeoning creativity, the woman betrayed. They are all here. With each one so vividly and insistently present, and each one just as immediately countered by the energetic presence of another, it becomes clear that none of them, that is, none of them on their own, will, in fact, do.

When the journals were first published, an editorial note introducing the section in which she rails against Hughes for suspected infidelity told us that the 'real source', as Plath 'notes eight months later', is 'her father'. Without that interference this time, we are thankfully spared having to judge anything here as less or more 'real' (although this publication should not be used to repress the history of past censorship of Plath).

In fact, we do Plath the greatest disservice, these journals can teach us, when we read her as aiming with determined and singular purpose for the tragic denouement waiting in the wings. Effervescent ('I can't stop effervescing'), the writing here fires in all directions at once. If it also displays a relentless and controlling logic, a 'will working back to hack out its own happenings', we should, however, note that plural ('happenings') - one will, but many disparate events.

We should note, too, how, with phrases like that, Plath takes responsibility for everything in her life. As you read, you can almost hear Plath issuing her advance warning against the single-track interpretations, all the attempts at blame or redemption, to come: 'I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. "A passionate, fragmentary girl" maybe?'

The serialisations of the journals over the past weeks, both here and in the States, have, predictably enough, selected those extracts which are most sensational - Plath's erotic life (her first sexual experiences, her first meeting with Hughes now uncensored, her marriage) and her inner psychic turmoil (her therapy with Ruth Beutscher, one of the sections of the journals sealed until 2013 and then unsealed by Hughes before he died).

It is not hard to see why. Plath's sexual life is rendered here with such intensity - 'Such good fuckings'; 'Pants wet with the sticky white filth of desire' (the 'filth' is presented as her mother's imagined disgust) - that it is as if there are no barriers between her body and the page on which she writes. Writing for Plath is a form of internal assault: 'What a poet I will flay myself into.'

Almost before you have had a chance to register the violence of the first sex with Hughes ('Washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted') and to note how far she goes to embrace it ('Consider yourself lucky to have been stabbed by him'), you can watch it racing into poetry: his 'I lust for him and in my mind am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields', and her own - 'Where are my small incidents... the blood poured from my shoes.'

Among other things, the journals offer us perhaps one of the most extraordinary records of sexual energy on the move: energy spilling and transmuting itself - but by no means always willing or able to do so - into words.

In her therapy with Ruth Beutscher in 1959, Plath rages without let or inhibition against her mother (Beutscher had also treated her at McLean's hospital during her previous breakdown in 1953 and supervised her electric-shock treatments). This is therapy as catharsis. Plath's father was the one who died, but her mother appears here as the haunting figure, the one who, in order for Plath to find her voice, must be placated: 'How can I get rid of this depression: by refusing to believe she has any power over me, like the old witches for whom one sets out plates of milk and honey?' (the phrase is uncannily resonant of Plath's last gesture of setting out plates of milk for her children before she died).

In a way, however, this is the weakest part of the book. Because it is so repetitive, against the grain of everything else in her writing, it suggests, as indeed the therapy itself seems to have done, that there might be one cause of Plath's anguish, her 'mental fear', one solution therefore, to her distress.

As we watch the increasingly smothering closeness of Plath's relationship with Hughes - 'As if I were living with one eyelash of myself only'; 'Dangerous to be so close to Ted day in day out... must strike out on my own' - it is hard not to start asking whether the euphoria and intimacy which Beutscher offered weren't also a trap. More repetition than cure: 'If I "cure" no one else in my whole career,' Beutscher wrote in an unpublished letter to Plath just months before she died, 'you are enough. I love you.'

It is perhaps ironic to reflect that in writing them, whatever the inner dialogue, Plath was, above all, writing these journals for herself, that there was no one there watching or loving, suggesting topics for poetry, or interpreting her dreams. This might be finally the most important thing about them. If they should be read as revelation, it is not so much for the life as for the writing - what she asked of it, what it did for her, where it failed.

For that reason alone, no potential writer trying to haul themselves from bed, drudgery or distraction into writing should miss them. Like all journals, these rent the veils of the very privacy they most fiercely protect. They ask to be read cautiously, going, but also respecting, the distance.

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